David Bowie

Reunions are always risky business. On one hand there's the fans' anticipation for an event that seems to turn back the clock to the good old days, on the other there's the risk of disappointment over something that can never again be exactly what it once was. A telling case was the reunion of Lou Reed with John Cale: it produced the beautiful "Songs For Drella", which nonetheless left a fairly negligible mark on a collective imagination forever tied to the memory of Velvet Underground. Something similar happened with the artistic rekindling between David Bowie and Brian Eno in the mid-1990s, with the release of "1.Outside". For many it was a revelation, but anyone expecting a fourth chapter of the Berlin saga could only come away disappointed.

But let's first quickly retrace the facts. David Bowie, in his relentless craving for change, had over the previous 15 years gone from the spotlight and red carpets of mainstream pop to the far more abrasive, alternative project of the first Tin Machine album, almost a repudiation of the preceding period, and then on to a new collaboration with Nile Rodgers for "Black Tie White Noise", once again chasing commercial success but by less obvious means, ten years after making his best-selling record, "Let's Dance", with Mr. Chic. But despite plenty of artistically interesting episodes, much of the critical establishment had snubbed his work throughout these years, and the notion had taken firm root that the Thin White Duke's last essential album had been "Scary Monsters" (as Federico Guglielmi duly notes in Classic Rock). So where to go from there?

Well, an unexpected turn came in 1994, after Bowie ran into Brian Eno again at his own wedding. Following that encounter, the triumphant collaboration that had led in the second half of the Seventies to the Berlin glories — a golden moment still fondly missed by many fans — was revived. Bowie had also inherited from Tin Machine his go-to heavyweight guitarist, a key figure throughout Bowie's discography. After Mick Ronson and Robert Fripp, it was now Reeves Gabrels's turn. And finally, another return to the good old days: Carlos Alomar. And so, "with a little help from his friends", Bowie managed to pull off his masterpiece of the decade: "1.Outside", precisely. Right in the middle of the Nineties, and right when his idol Scott Walker was releasing "Tilt".

It was 1995. If Nirvana had defined the decade with their taste for dirty, alternative sound, Bowie's more direct point of reference was Nine Inch Nails, with that electro-hard-industrial blend that made "The Downward Spiral" an album able to sound like several things at once. And "1.Outside" would pull off the same feat.

The number 1 in the title refers to the colossal project Bowie had in mind: a series of no fewer than five albums (enough to make the "trilogy" pale in comparison) narrating (at least at first) the story of detective Nathan Adler, culminating in a grand live staging in Salzburg. However, perhaps because the expected ovation never came, or because the restless Bowie had in the meantime become fascinated with something else (jungle music, which led him to the intriguing "Earthling"), all that survives of this project is this first chapter. Which, on its own, already amounts to an epic.

Bowie was determined to bring out his darkest side, and this time, finally, without holding back. The device is a deeply unsettling story: detective Nathan Adler must investigate the murder of Baby Grace Blue, a fourteen-year-old girl killed and mutilated in an extreme body-art performance. In this bleak, morbid drama, Bowie intended to depict the anthropological turning point between the two millennia, adding new experiments to anticipate the music of the 2000s. The horizon was that of the most provocative "artistic" scene, the world of extreme body art. A cast of highly unsavoury characters with rather questionable taste, yet ones to which Bowie was strongly drawn. On top of this came the cyber-punk world tied to the rise of computing and the internet. This alone answers the criticism of Francesco Donadio, author of the important book "David Bowie – Fantastic Voyage", who argued that Bowie's Seventies records dealt with "themes of universal significance", whereas here the English artist supposedly focused "on his more recent interests as a niche adult intellectual" (even if true, that would hardly be a valid yardstick for judging the artistic quality of a work). On the contrary, computing would go on to shape everyone's life more and more, and if anything it is to Bowie's credit that he underlined this very fact in the exact year the internet was brought within everyone's reach via Windows 95. Here too, then, Bowie must be credited with yet another display of his razor-sharp instinct. Indeed, Donadio himself, also torn in his overall assessment of the album, will admit that at least on the computing front, "Bowie had got it right".

The fact remains that, in our view, "1.Outside" is truly one of the masterpieces of the Nineties, a symphonic poem that doesn't hit a single wrong note.

After the semi-instrumental intro (which we'll return to later), the first proper song, the title track "Outside", seems to pick up the futuristic effect that already characterised "Speed Of Life" (from "Low", 1977). But here it's not the rhythm that gets foregrounded, there's no motorik pulse urging you forward: on the contrary, what's being shown is a slow, dark, desolate reality, evoking a 90s Metropolis.

Next comes "The Hearts Filthy Lesson", to these ears one of the most original tracks Bowie ever recorded: sure, the influence of his disciples Nine Inch Nails is obvious, but the Thin White Duke reclaims what's rightfully his, filtering it all through the grotesque, theatrical lens so typical of him (thereby also answering the Trent Reznor-indebted side of Marilyn Manson). "A Small Plot Of Land" opens with a long, acidic, alienating instrumental intro, followed by a suspended vocal part that, rather than resting on a melody, feels like it's groping its way forward on raw emotion, trying to avoid falling into the abyss one senses lying beneath it.

Then there are the monologues of the "concept album"'s characters, such as teenager Baby Grace Blue, all voiced by Bowie, heightening the sense of estrangement, which reaches its peak on "Wishful Beginnings", co-written with Brian Eno. The London-born artist has always enjoyed playing at being darkly handsome, but often with that sweetening cunning that winks at pop. Here, though, there's none of that: this is pure electronic claustrophobia, the melody almost disappears, the rhythm is slow yet obsessive, and the rarefied atmospheres might in some ways recall "Art Decade", but without the decadent dandy aesthetic: instead they shape, on one hand, a sadism that dissolves into tenderness, a feeling widespread among tormentors towards their victims, and on the other, pain at its final stage, muffled by numbness (the line "The pain must feel like snow", intoned obsessively, sounds almost sweet, and the repeated plea "Sorry Little Girl" is terrifying, just as terrible is the bitter self-pity, extended to the victim too, in the key line "We had such wishful beginnings/ But we lived unbearable lives", as if the tormentor were inflicting on the victim the very malaise he himself had experienced: a true masterstroke in conveying the perverse morbidity of the criminal mind).

Bowie throws that unflinching harshness in his fans' faces, something he'd probably wanted to give shape to many times before but never had the nerve to; with Eno's help, he finally manages it. On his own, he then writes the more conventional "The Motel", one of his own favourite tracks on the whole album, an almost piano-bar, jazz-club number (the same jazz clubs already evoked by the sax on "Subterraneans" from "Low"), yet one of pure, icy, sharp, disenchanted beauty, turning "explosive" in its final section.

The album provoked, and will go on provoking, conflicting reactions over the years: some enthusiastic (there were those who called it "his best record since the days of 'Scary Monsters'", or, like Andy Greene of Rolling Stone, "Bowie's most experimental album since the Berlin period"), others negative, often wildly off the mark. It was said, for instance, that it was an interesting album but too electronic, or that it didn't contain enough pop material, as David Fricke argued, also in Rolling Stone. As if the Thin White Duke were meant only to supply generational pop anthems to hum along to on the radio, forever bound to the conventions of a "Starman" or an "All The Young Dudes". When in fact "1.Outside" does contain plenty of pop songs, just think of "I Have Never Been To Oxford Town", "We Prick You", "The Voyeur Of Utter Destruction", "Through These Architects Eyes", right down to the reassuringly melodic closing track "Strangers When We Meet" (this last one, at least, was indeed appreciated as such by Fricke). "We Prick You" sounds paradoxically futuristic in its imitation of the by-then outdated synthetic sounds of 80s consoles. "The Voyeur Of Utter Destruction" and "Through These Architect Eyes" are magnificent epic rides that give free rein to pathos. It's Stephen Trousse of Uncut who will recognise the pop potential of "I Have Never Been To Oxford Town", ranking it among "the best and most underrated pop songs of Bowie's career". And it's particularly ironic that Reeves Gabrels confessed to Francesco Donadio that the final result of "1.Outside" ended up far more pop than the original project had been, to please the record executives: "Everyone wanted hit singles, so it was reworked (…) But in doing so it was completely torn apart". Luckily, one of the songs surviving from that original project (albeit heavily reworked later), the aforementioned "The Hearts Filthy Lesson", became the album's lead single.

Little is conceded to easy listening, however, on "I Am With Name", an experimental track built less on melody than on the hypnotic repetition of clashing sonic textures and a hammering rhythm, complete with closing alarm sirens signalling the era about to dawn.

Another sticking point for Fricke and other detractors is the synthetic manipulation of Bowie's voice used to simulate the drama's various characters (these, incidentally, are among the other surviving tracks from the original project). But hadn't vocal distortion via varispeeding already been used in Bowie classics like "The Bewlay Brothers", "Fame" and "Scream Like A Baby"? And didn't Bowie himself state in an interview that he'd always loved this technique? What's more, with hindsight, this particular criticism now seems rather quaint, given today's music scene dominated by the heavy use of autotune. If anything, then, it must be said that here too Bowie had got it right. The person who, in a sense, seems to grasp how consistent this aspect is with the rest of the English artist's output is, once again, Stephen Trousse, whose shrewd and well-grounded analysis of the album we largely agree with.

Also worth remembering is "Hallo Spaceboy", a Stardust-era echo thrown in to keep old fans happy, on which Reeves Gabrels' guitar work proves essential. Together with the percussion, it introduces a violent, intermittent sound simulating the track's galactic storms, later remixed by the Pet Shop Boys. Truth be told, though, this track can be understood as the conceptual key to the whole album, and it provides an answer to some of the other misunderstandings the record has generated. Andy Greene wrote that "1.Outside" had left fans confused and listeners baffled. In truth, there's nothing to be surprised about, and this was probably exactly what Bowie wanted, as Tom Doyle of Q magazine observed. To see this, one need only listen to Bowie's own words in "Moonage Daydream", the documentary film directed by Brett Morgen, which opens precisely to the strains of "Hallo Spaceboy": the Thin White Duke observes that chaos had always been a fundamental hallmark of his work, and that he perceived the 90s as particularly chaotic and fragmented, adding, finally, that he knew exactly what that felt like. Hence the lyrics of "Hallo Spaceboy" declaring: “Do you like girls or boys?/ It’s confusing these days/ But moondust will cover you, cover you/ This chaos is killing me”. And it's no accident that the lyrics of "1.Outside" sound so particularly chaotic: Bowie produced them using the Verbasizer, a program for randomly combining words. It was "a digital version of the cut-up technique he had already been using for decades", as Jacopo Benci of Classic Rock will observe.

But it wasn't just the Verbasizer: the musicians in the team were also made to play out role-playing games, immersing themselves in eccentric characters devised by Brian Eno. All to push the schizophrenia pedal as hard as possible. In the end, nothing was meant to come across as too straightforward; everything had to be as chaotic and fragmented as possible.

Let's continue our analysis with "I'm Deranged", another limpid, crystalline, disorienting, desolate track co-written with Eno, whose visionary power wouldn't go unnoticed by David Lynch, who used it for the film "Lost Highway" (reclaiming what was rightfully his: "Twin Peaks" had been one of the album's sources of inspiration, as if there weren't already enough of them). Then there's "No Control", almost a reprise of the title track in its futuristic, electronic, epic and apocalyptic march.

Beyond all the stylistic exercises of music criticism and whatever prejudices fans might have had, it's genuinely hard to understand how the sheer beauty of the songs making up this album failed to win over listeners naturally. And these aren't isolated tracks: the whole record is particularly accomplished, never lapsing into the obvious, and the key thread running through every track is the powerful emotion that Bowie surprisingly manages to draw out from beneath the imposing electronic shroud.

We still have to (finish) clarifying the album's title. Why "Outside"? One might think it stems from the "outside" nature of the extreme body art that Bowie openly drew on. But that's not entirely true. You have to read Francesco Donadio's book to piece it together. The artists Bowie initially referenced were true social "outsiders": patients at the Gugging psychiatric clinic in Vienna, run by psychiatrist Leo Navratil. According to him, patients "in the most acute phase of their illness" would end up "creating works of considerable artistic value", which is why he encouraged them to give free rein to their creativity. Bowie and Eno had seen some of their work firsthand during a visit to the clinic in 1994, and had been deeply struck by it.

That was the first spark for Bowie's most disruptive record in over a decade. And despite the profound changes that occurred during the making of the album, this initial seed of inspiration would ultimately provide the album's opener, the track "Leon Takes Us Outside". Leon is one of the characters in this concept album, inspired precisely by Leo Navratil, who, according to Donadio, had led Bowie and Eno "outside the normal modes of artistic creation". Donadio also notes that, curiously, the title track "Outside", which immediately follows the opener, was actually added to the album toward the end of the recording sessions, and is even narratively disconnected from the rest of the work: it would instead represent a statement of intent, a way of positioning himself "outside the chart-driven mainstream" the English musician had inhabited in recent years.

Overall, though, we believe "Outside.1" never received the recognition it deserved. Even Donadio, not entirely exempting himself from the ranks of detractors, notes that it's an album with "dozens of flaws". To this writer, however, "1.Outside" still stands as one of David Bowie's best and most original albums, one of those records where the London-born musician manages to lay himself most bare, uncompromisingly revealing his darkest sides: here pain, unease and desolation are given free rein, before arriving at the more soothing (melodically speaking) closing track, "Strangers When We Meet".

This album holds the essence of the Teutonic, electronic Bowie, unmediated, stripped of the usual horns and of many of his typical black-music influences. What have been singled out as "flaws" instead seem more like messages Bowie deliberately sent his listeners. And today we're beginning to see, at a social level, just how strikingly the premonitory aspects of Bowie's analysis - the unstoppable advance of a cyborg post-humanity thrashing convulsively through the maze of a deeply alienating confusion - are increasingly taking hold.

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06/03/2026